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Man, days don't get a whole lot better than this one. Bryce Harper gets his biggest hit of the season so far, walking off the Mess in the 13th inning to extend our division lead to 4.5 games. And if that by itself isn't good enough, the Baltimore scumbag initiates the first legal action in the MASN dispute, likely guaranteeing him permanent bad-guy status and the enmity of most of the rest of the league for however many years he has left.

Can't see how Angelos wins in the long run if the terms of the MASN agreement were accurately described in the various media reports. We'll see if Selig follows up on his threat of fines and other discipline, but if he does the Orioles should be out some draft choices.

Can't see how Angelos wins in the long run if the terms of the MASN agreement were accurately described in the various media reports.

He can't win in the long run, and I suspect he knows this. But the odds are that he doesn't have a long run. This is all about the short run; he's going to use every trick in the book to try to draw this process out for as long as he can so he can continue picking our pockets while he runs the clock out.

There's a pretty decent chance that MASN won't even exist five years from now. It's an almost worthless network that was created for the sole purpose of harming the Nationals' ability to compete on the open market. Let's get real: you can only show the same episode of the World Poker Tour so many times in one week and expect to have value.

If, by some miracle, the Nationals are able to break out of the MASN deal they could join Comcast Sports Net which already has an established presence in D.C. I can only see that as boosting the value of CSN without encumbering the Nats with the messy business of setting up yet another RSN.

Yeah, Angelos is trying to screw the Nats out of one decent cable deal before the bubble pops, since they actually are spending some money now and are competitive. This won't end soon, and it will probably get uglier than Pete in drag.

MASN might have made some headway in Washington had it been able to grab rights to the Caps or Wizards. Without it, MASN was left with not much in the way of off-season programming other than college sports (and Comcast SportsNet had rights to Maryland and the ACC, to which it belonged at the time).

Are any of these regonial sports networks worth a damn? MASN is one of the most watched networks in my house, but we sure don't watch anything on it but baseball, but that was the same case with Yes and SNY when I lived in New York. I guess Yes had yankee documentaries and stuff so you could leave it on if you were desperate in a way you can't do with the others.

If Angelos is getting some sort of windfall from MASN, it doesn’t appear he’s investing it in the team. The Orioles rank squarely in the middle of the pack in every conceivable metric – attendance, revenue, franchise value, payroll. So as an O’s fan, I don’t really care if the MASN partnership evaporates.

Personally, I doubt there’s any such windfall, and this is really about the Nats trying to break out of the agreement so they can control their own fate a bit more, which is perfectly understandable from the perspective of Nats ownership.

But I don’t really see how that would benefit Nats fans. Would the Nats would be able to hire better television commentators if they had their own RSN? How else does this have any impact on fans of either team?

But I don’t really see how that would benefit Nats fans. Would the Nats would be able to hire better television commentators if they had their own RSN? How else does this have any impact on fans of either team?

The Nationals are getting something like $30 million in revenue from the RSN. They argue (and the arbitration panel agreed) that they should be getting over $100.

That $70 million isn't entirely going into payroll... but half of it sure would make this a better team.

Yeah, this is why I don't get when people act like the RSNs -- or the cable companies in general -- need to continue to have a piece of the pie going forward. Sure, the Yankees make a lot more money by owning YES themselves than they would if a third party broadcast their games. But it'd be even better if they could just broadcast the games directly to their fans, and didn't have to deal with the charade of running "the YES Network" as a cable television channel. And I really don't think we are that far away from that being very plausible.

It's not just the pure dollars pouring into the coffers. The money made by MASN profits is not subject to MLB revenue sharing, whereas telecast rights fees are. So the more profit MASN shows overall, the more money Angelos can pocket while MLB can't touch it.

So it's more than just Angelos not wanting to surrender more money, it's also about the manner in which it's surrendered and where it goes.

Calcaterra wrote a blurb about this back in February, with a leadoff link to a much more in-depth story by Jonah Keri for further reading.